Dive into the complete episode list for Disengaged. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.
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Title
Pub. Date
Duration
Everything is Personal With Louis Roden
22 oct. 2026
01:02:55
“When they say let’s take the emotion out of the decision, that’s even an emotional decision.”
Louis Roden is the founder of Inspire Consulting Group, an international leadership development consultancy, and has spent more than two decades in organizational development and service culture across hospitality, logistics, and finance. His book Everything Is Personal: Embracing Stewardship in the Workplace and Everyplace argues that leaders who hide behind “it’s just business” erode the trust their people need. We cover the phrase “it’s business, not personal,” stewardship, why work feels neutral for so many people, how leaders build trust day to day, and why the golden rule gets it wrong.
What we covered:
The COVID lockdown and the nudge from his wife that got the book finished
Mark Twain’s “Be good and you will be lonesome” and Following the Equator as the first travel blog
Why nobody says they loved a job because they were well managed
Work as a gray, neutral 80 percent of waking life
Why Louis can’t stand the phrase work-life balance
Stewardship of the people who hand a leader a big piece of their lives
Layoffs, hard feedback, and the trite cover of “it’s not personal”
Why no one can take the emotion out of a decision
Frederick Taylor, scientific management, and work as a negative good
Rational and irrational anger, and empathy for joy as well as sadness
Trust built in small moments and eroded by paper cuts
The bartender whose smile disappears when the bar gets busy
Thirty authentic seconds over a scheduled one-hour one-on-one
The weekly check-in as a box to tick
Flipping the golden rule: treat people the way they want to be treated
The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya’s sword, and anyone selling a magic bullet
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Right Kind of Wrong with Amy Edmondson
15 oct. 2026
00:51:09
“In a novel context, a context like science or R&D or innovation or entrepreneurship, mediocrity would be no failures.”
Amy Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Her research made psychological safety a core idea in modern management, and she is the author of Teaming, The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong, which won the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year in 2023. We cover the failed hypothesis that launched her career, why bad is stronger than good, the three types of failure, Toyota’s Andon cord, near misses, whether failure is a privilege, and what leaders can do to build psychological safety.
What we covered:
The 1990s hospital study where the better teams seemed to make more medication errors
The realization that those teams were reporting more of their errors
Awfulizing, then a looking-out-the-window moment in a 15th-floor PhD office
Interpersonal risk and why psychological safety matters most in knowledge work
Why we notice negatives faster than positives
Going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Basic, complex and intelligent failures, and the five criteria for an intelligent one
Astro Teller at X: if you’re not failing, you’re not taking the right risks
Rewarding teams for shutting down failing projects
The fundamental attribution error, at work and at home
James Reason’s Swiss cheese model in aviation and healthcare
Toyota’s Andon cord, from loom machines to a San Francisco trolley car, and why most pulls never stop the line
Near misses as good catches, and the case for a near miss day
Why failure is a privilege, and how leaders can level the failure playing field
Whether encouraging failure means celebrating mediocrity
Three moves to build psychological safety: frame the work, ask questions, respond productively
People:
Arie Kruglanski, psychologist and previous guest on this show
Roy Baumeister, social psychologist
Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor
Astro Teller, head of X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory
James Reason, British error psychologist
Books:
Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson
The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson
Teaming, Amy Edmondson
The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
The Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Articles:
Bad Is Stronger Than Good, Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer and Kathleen Vohs, Review of General Psychology, 2001 https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323
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How to Build HR That Works with Jessie Schofer
08 oct. 2026
01:12:42
"You kind of sell your soul, it's like blood money a little bit."
Jessie Schofer is the founder of Stakkd, a database that helps HR teams find their way through a crowded technology market. She came to HR from projects and transformation work, led people strategy and change inside hyperscaling unicorns, and this year moderated two debates I took part in, and lost. We cover what she saw from the moderator's chair, why people arrive at a new job engaged and lose it within months, why HR keeps falling short, and why she has been saying HR is dead for years.
What we covered:
Why we still need managers in a world of AI, from the debate moderator
The scale-ups where every team wrote its own operating manual
Poor relationships at work as the root of Jessie's most disengaged years
Beautiful mission statements at companies that are still hard to work for
Ricardo Semler's diseconomies of human scale, and Dunbar's number
Zapier welcoming candidates who pull out of its hiring process
New hires who were sold a story and ask, "What did I sign up to?"
Calibration meetings and the five-out-of-five rating
AI performance ratings as scientific management 2.0
Tiny teams, the pizza rule, and splitting teams before they grow too big
Why individual pay for performance discourages admitting mistakes
The director of comp Jessie told not to join
Why HR is burnt out, and the growth playbooks she wants to throw out
Renaming HR as organizational success
Maslow, duty of care, and whether we will look back on disengagement as unfair
Stakkd, its HR tech database, and Stakkd 2.0
People:
Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN and previous guest on this show
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Anti-Consulting with Gerry Murphy
01 oct. 2026
01:30:44
Is it possible to run a professional services company without individual goals, without billable hours, without performance ratings? Gerry Murphy and Nua Group certainly think so...
Gerry Murphy is a co-founder and partner at Nua Group, the San Francisco firm that describes itself as the anti-consulting firm. He qualified as an actuary in Dublin, spent eight years in Europe, and was a senior partner at Mercer with earlier leadership roles at Watson Wyatt before he, Joe and Chris set Nua up ten years ago. We cover the anti-consulting model, what happens to accountability when you delete the machinery, managers who never wanted the job, job architecture as a system of control, and whether any of it survives at ten thousand people.
What we covered:
Anti-consulting as a playful poke at billable hours, sales goals and internal meetings
Clients love their consultants, not the firms those consultants work for
Two internal meetings every two weeks, and what the rest of the week is for
Nua consultants asking the partners whether they could please track their hours
The nickel and diming that comes with the hourly model
Everyone at Nua gets the same bonus, whatever their individual performance
The bonus that moves from 20 percent to 21 and pleases nobody
Four job levels on paper, two in practice: partner and consultant
Majors and minors in place of practice areas
Gerry's rules of management, starting with do nothing, ending with two blank rules
Managers who never wanted the job and took it for the pay
Mercer's manager charter, and Jensen Huang's thirty direct reports
Electing your own manager, and where Gerry pushes back on the idea
The client whose job architecture, bonuses and equity created an incredible amount of work
Whether AI makes experience and education requirements irrelevant
Stock options, RSUs, dilution and growth
The Ryland Report, and why the team asked for more financial detail, not less
Scaling to ten thousand people, and the naming of Uber Nua
People:
Joe Farris, co-founder of Nua Group
Paul Reiman, compensation consultant and previous guest on this show
Dan Walter, equity compensation specialist and the first guest on this show
Jack Stack, who led one of the most leveraged employee buyouts in US history
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Pay Differently with Paul Reiman
24 sept. 2026
01:27:34
"Best practice is either a product that somebody wants to sell and as a result it's common, but not necessarily proven as best."
Paul Reiman is the founder and managing partner of Novo Insights, a Chicago-based compensation consulting firm, with nearly 30 years in compensation as a consultant and in-house leader. His book Pay Differently, out October 5, argues that pay transparency exposes the shortcuts compensation teams have relied on for decades. We cover the myth of best practice, the loyalty tax, job architecture as the office refrigerator, why the offer letter draws less scrutiny than the merit cycle, and whether sales commissions survive consumption-based selling.
What we covered:
Best practice as common practice with a better publicist
The telecom sales leader who asked a 22-year-old Paul, "Best practice according to whom?"
The unproven rule of three measures in a sales plan, none under 20 percent
Why candidates who refuse to apply without a range move employers faster than legislation
The $100 toaster on sale for $50 the next day
The fintech firm that turned down a star analyst asking for a $1 million salary
The 75th percentile, and why a percentile is not a philosophy
Job architecture as the office refrigerator and its 180 ketchup packets
The manager who automates three roles and loses every direct report
The loyalty tax, and why stayers earn less than leavers
Merit budget benchmarking, and why to budget 9 percent next year
Same-store pay growth, borrowed from Starbucks
Lori the recruiter, her Coffee is for Closers mug, and fixing the front door
Self-set pay at Semco and Smarkets, and crunchy or creamy peanut butter
The printing company that replaced commissions with salary and profit share
The hand-drawn overhead transparency behind the 50/50 pay mix slide
People:
Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and previous guest on this show
Andrea LaRowe, 37signals, previous guest on this show
Stefan Gaertner, Syndio, previous guest on this show
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, researchers
Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professor
Louis Kelso, economist
Philip Slater, sociologist
Jerry Colletti, sales compensation consultant
Bryan Briscoe, Paul's longtime co-presenter
Books:
Pay Differently, Paul Reiman
Chasing Stars, Boris Groysberg
The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
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Predictably Irrational with Dan Ariely
17 sept. 2026
01:06:59
Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He co-founded Irrational Capital and has written eight books, including Predictably Irrational and Misbelief, which he wrote after a COVID conspiracy theory cast him as one of its villains.
We cover the vintage Swiss Army knife model of decision-making, the India experiments behind Large Stakes and Big Mistakes, what Fortune 500 satisfaction surveys predict about stock returns, fairness as a judgment no regression will settle, and the writing Dan is doing now about the end of life.
What we covered:
States that introduced fines for texting and driving and watched accidents rise
The brain as a vintage Swiss army knife, adequate at many tasks, built for a world we have left
Car engineers who design against human error, social media engineers who design for it
Prepaid debit against credit, weekly loads against monthly, Monday against Friday
The India experiments, where a month of pay riding on a puzzle made people worse at solving it
The brain surgeon offered $100,000 and threatened with a hitman in parking spot 33
Which survey questions predict alpha, and which predict nothing
Perceived fairness outranking salary level, and the argument Dan could not win on Wall Street
The company that spent a day celebrating failed projects and paid half a million dollars to the winner
Bureaucracy as an engine whose definition of success is nothing happening
The hospital janitor we want to stop doing their job, and what job descriptions cost us
Theory X, Theory Y, and the ancient craftsmen who spent half their time on beauty
Two years spent interviewing the people who wanted him tried, imprisoned, or hanged
Writing as a way to make sense of his mother's death, and the three books he has in progress
People:
Alfie Kohn, author and previous guest on this show
Simon Jones, narrator of Dan's audiobooks
Ed Lazear, economist behind the Safelite windshield study
Sam Glucksberg, psychologist of the candle problem experiments
Douglas McGregor, originator of Theory X and Theory Y
Books:
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
Misbelief, Dan Ariely
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
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How to Get Pay Right with Matt McFarlane
10 sept. 2026
01:15:21
Matt McFarlane and I met earlier this year on opposite sides of a debate about pay for performance. His team argued in favor and won the audience vote 62 to 38, and a week later he published a piece saying he had never been a fan of it. That opening carries the rest of the conversation: what pay for performance sets out to do, why the mechanism breaks at nearly every link in the chain, and what companies use instead once they stop treating an annual rating as the engine of everything.
Matt runs FNDN, a compensation consultancy for startups based in Australia. He built the pay structures at Oyster that carried the company from 200 to 600 people across 70 countries, and he now hosts the FNDN Series podcast and newsletter and runs the Startup People Summit, a one-day APAC event for people leaders inside high-growth companies. We cover the companies that have taken negotiation out of pay entirely, the grip that benchmark data holds over compensation decisions, the tension between fairness and individual pay in collaborative work, what happens to the manager's role as AI absorbs more of the coordination, and the practical side of leaving a salaried job to consult.
What we covered
Why Matt argued for pay for performance in a debate and against it a week later
The three percent merit budget, and what the annual salary survey roundups tell us
Rewarding a standout year with money, or using it to raise the standard across a team
Why Matt left the job he enjoyed most in his career to build a compensation practice
How his client window moved from 50 employees to 100 or 150, and what breaks at that size
Benchmarking as a source of cognitive closure, and the living wage argument underneath it
Runn's single rate per role, and the salary trajectory that made their people harder to poach
Carta, 37signals, Buffer, and PayPal as models that remove the negotiation
Fairness as a relative judgment, and how quickly a good salary becomes an unfair one
Why US companies resist narrow bands, and what wide bands say about trust in hiring
The bad hire label, the myth of the A player, and where responsibility for performance sits
The player coach, the stretched leader, and ClickUp's million-dollar salary bands
What Matt tells anyone thinking about leaving a salaried role to consult
People Matt McFarlane, founder of FNDN Rowan Savage, co-founder and CTO of Runn Andrea LaRowe of 37signals, a previous guest on this show
Books Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
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Protecting the Potential of the Idea with Dylan Soopramania
03 sept. 2026
02:18:44
Dylan Soopramania is a creative director and consultant whose work spans the UK, Australia, and North America, with campaigns for Coca-Cola, EA Sports, KitKat, Hellmann's, and Google. He designed the covers for all three of my books and the branding for this podcast. We have known each other for thirty years, and this is the first episode recorded in person and the first under the Disengaged name.
Advertising is the one industry where creativity is the product, which makes it the sharpest test of the argument in Close the Gap. Dylan's rule for creative leads is to protect the potential of the idea: push it to the point where you and your trusted partners feel uncomfortable, because ideas get killed in internal conversations long before anyone learns where they could have gone. The same problem sits inside every business that needs to innovate. If people do not feel safe suggesting things that might get shot down, they play it down the middle. Dylan's account of what happened when I stopped chasing him on the cover, that the more I backed off the more responsible he felt, is the whole book in one sentence.
What we covered:
What a creative director does, and why brands rent a creative's tone of voice
How the Close the Gap cover came about
Good briefs, bad briefs, and Hellmann's sneakers made from food waste
Presenting irrational ideas to rational people
Mad Men is dead: culture now informs marketing
Protecting the potential of the idea
Pixar's brain trust and the Overton window
Culture fit as hiring people who look and sound like you
Why the modern company still runs on a hierarchy inherited from the church and the factory
The KitKat catapult
Focus groups, market data, and the sea of sameness
The manager as emulsifier
Trust, control, purpose, and tension
Why asking people to keep doing what they do well kills the spark
Freelance versus full time
Leaving Dylan alone: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in one example
Proactive work, gold wall sessions, and 3M's fifteen percent time
Executive pay, the C-suite, and the role of profit
People: Steve Hey (Dylan's creative partner), Dart Lindsley (Work for Humans), Jessie Zwaan (job, career, calling), Amy Wrzesniewski, Aaron Dignan, Rensis Likert, Abraham Maslow, Joseph Overton, Paul Buchheit, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs
Books: Close the Gap and What Pay Costs (James Seechurn), Purpose and Work (Jessie Zwaan), Brave New Work (Aaron Dignan), Colin Splodge and The Sizzledodge (Steve Hey and Dylan Soopramania)
Organizations: Pixar, Coca-Cola, KitKat / J. Walter Thompson Sydney, Hellmann's / Ogilvy, Banana Boat, Google / The Hallway, 3M, General Electric, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, Nucor, Handelsbanken, Haier, AFL-CIO, MSCI
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Uncertainty and Closure with Arie Kruglanski
29 juil. 2026
01:27:11
Arie Kruglanski is one of the most cited social psychologists alive, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and a co-founder of START, the national center for the study of terrorism. He gave the field two ideas that shape this conversation: the need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve ambiguity and settle on an answer, and significance quest theory, the claim that the need to matter sits beneath much of what we do. This episode takes both into the workplace.
We start small, with a question that sent James to Arie's work in the first place: why do companies cling to performance ratings, job titles, and job architecture when the evidence against them is overwhelming? Closure is the answer, and Arie explains why noise, fatigue, and time pressure make people more certain rather than less, and why premature closure has been the mother of great mistakes, from Pearl Harbor to organizational change. From there we move to significance: the oldest complaint in history, the road that took Arie from architecture to psychology, and why pay has become the emblem of how much we matter. We close on the hardest problem of all, how anything changes, and a personal question about holding confidence and uncertainty at the same time.
What we covered
Cognitive closure, and why difficult conditions produce false confidence rather than better thinking
Seizing and freezing, belief perseverance, and why information that was available still gets ignored
The Italian postal workers, and why people resist the idea of change more than any specific change
Careers as closure: why we follow available jobs over real passions, and Arie's own turn away from architecture
The quest for significance, from terrorism research to the workplace where most people earn their worth
Pay as significance, the CEO pay ratio, and the insatiability that comes with a bigness-oriented culture
Bigness and Smallness, the reciprocal model of significance, and love as merit times appreciation
Competitive individualism, Arachne and hubris, and whether significance requires winners and losers
Weber, Calvinism, and the roots of the American work ethic
Psychological safety, loss aversion, and why change must start small
Religion as an ancient antidote to hubris, and what fills the vacuum when it recedes
People: Arie Kruglanski (University of Maryland, START). Referenced: Dan Raviv and Sophia Moskalenko, his co-authors; Harold Kelley; Antonio Pierro; B. F. Skinner; Alfie Kohn (No Contest); Leon Festinger (When Prophecy Fails); Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (positive psychology); Carol Dweck; Angela Duckworth; Antonio Damasio; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (loss aversion); Amy Edmondson (psychological safety); Max Weber.
Books: Uncertain: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Greatest Power; The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round, with Dan Raviv; and the new Feeling Big, Feeling Small: The Human Yearning for Significance and Wonder, with Sophia Moskalenko.
Find Arie: through his books, and on The Quest for Significance podcast, which he hosts with Dan Raviv.
The Employee Advantage with Stephan Meier
16 juil. 2026
01:24:59
In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Stephan Meier — behavioral economist, Professor of Business Strategy at Columbia Business School, and author of The Employee Advantage — to explore why the next great shift in business is from customer-centricity to employee-centricity.
Stephan's argument is that business has made this journey before. Companies moved from a product-centric to a customer-centric model, building tools along the way — segmentation, journey mapping, personalisation — to understand and delight customers. Those same tools can now be repurposed for employees, and the companies that do it will create an advantage rivals cannot easily copy. As Stephan puts it, hard is good: a culture where people are engaged, motivated, and innovative takes years to build — and that is exactly what makes it difficult to compete with.
What we covered:
The evolution from shareholder value to customer centricity to employee centricity
The zero-sum fallacy — Amazon's Harry Potter gamble and Costco's employee-first economics
Where money works, where it stops moving the needle, and how a $5 favour destroys a friendship
Purpose — Kennedy's single mission for NASA and the janitor who wasn't mopping floors
The engaged coach — clear direction with real empowerment
Eli Lilly applying customer journey mapping to female talent progression
H-E-B's cult following and the four-star truck driver
Haier's RenDanHeYi model of autonomous micro-enterprises
Buurtzorg's self-managing nurse teams
Just right tasks — why the reward for good work is more good work
AI-powered internal talent marketplaces at MasterCard, MetLife, and Unilever
The workforce of one — segmentation and personalisation through one-on-ones
People
Stephan Meier — author of The Employee Advantage
Alfie Kohn — author of Punished by Rewards
Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
Jessie Zwaan — value beyond price
Megan Bernard-May — people experience design
Uri Gneezy — Stephan's co-author on incentives
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — meaningful progress
Jos de Blok — founder of Buurtzorg
Joseph Overton — the Overton window
Dan Gutman and Stuart Gibbs — the just right books
Books
The Employee Advantage — Stephan Meier
Punished by Rewards — Alfie Kohn
My Weird School series — Dan Gutman
Spy School series — Stuart Gibbs
Organisations
Amazon, Costco, Starbucks — customer centricity case studies
Eli Lilly — employee journey mapping
H-E-B — the employee-centric grocer
Haier / GE Appliances — autonomous micro-enterprises
Find Stephan at stephanmeier.com, where you can subscribe to his newsletter on the human-centric future of work — each edition comes with an original stop-motion Lego movie.
Purpose and Work with Jessica Zwaan
02 juil. 2026
01:20:30
In this episode of Disengaged, I'm joined by Jessie Zwaan — VP of People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work — to dig into the gap between the purpose companies advertise and the work people actually live.
Jessie's argument cuts against a lot of HR orthodoxy. Most people don't come to work for the company mission, and pretending they do creates a dissonance employees feel but rarely voice — an Emperor's New Clothes problem she traces through the anti-work movement, which she reads as a funhouse mirror held up to HR. Drawing on Joe Pine's experience economy, she places work on a spectrum from service to experience to transformation, and argues most workplaces are experiential, and that this is fine. People are motivated by connection, autonomy, and creativity far more than by mission — so design work around what you can genuinely offer instead of selling a purpose no one believes.
What we covered:
Work as a product — the three symbiotic products every company runs, and why employee experience behaves like a subscription
Pine's experience economy applied to work, illustrated through a cup of coffee, and where most workplaces actually sit
Wrzesniewski's job, career, and calling orientations, and why performance doesn't differ across them
The purpose gap, and how to close it without overreaching
The anti-work movement as a funhouse mirror of HR
Leveling guides and job architecture as systems of control — cognitive closure, familiarity bias, and why bare-bones wins
Whether AI will fix decision-making and performance management, and why the answer is mostly no
The T-shaped employee, and applying deep expertise broadly in an AI era
The perception of laziness across generations (Dickens wrote fifteen novels and never worked afternoons), and the shift from individual to collective measurement
People
Jessie Zwaan — author of Built for People and Purpose and Work
Dart Lindsley — host of Work for Humans
Joe Pine — the experience economy
Amy Wrzesniewski — job, career, and calling
Peter Fader — author of The Customer Base Audit
Stephan Meier — employee segmentation
Arie Kruglanski — need for cognitive closure
Rensis Likert — participative management
Andy Whitlock — The Human Half
Huw Slater — Oli
Teresa Amabile — the progress principle
Barry Schwartz — critique of rational choice
Books
Purpose and Work — Jessie Zwaan
Built for People — Jessie Zwaan
What Pay Costs — James Alexander Seechurn
The Customer Base Audit — Peter Fader
Come Up for Air — Nick Sonnenberg
Organisations
Leapsome — where Jessie leads people strategy
Intuit — finding purpose within a constrained mission
The Human Half — Andy Whitlock's consultancy
Oli — Huw Slater's company
Modern People Leader — collaborators on Jessie's Substack, PL Build
37signals with Andrea LaRowe
04 juin 2026
01:33:36
In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Hey - to find out how a high-trust, low-control company runs day to day.
Andrea's core argument: stop tying pay to performance and you strip a layer of politics out of work. 37signals benchmarks salaries once a year to the 90th percentile of the San Francisco tech market, with no negotiation and no manager involvement, and rewards tenure through a profit share. Reviews still happen, on each person's anniversary, but they're a check-in rather than a lever for pay. What drives the work is intrinsic motivation - and a small, flat, bootstrapped company built to support it.
What we covered:
How pay works - benchmarking to Radford's 90th percentile, no merit cycle, no negotiation, and why managers stay out of it
What reviews are for once pay is off the table, and why staggering them by anniversary beats an annual scramble
The five-level structure - why level three (senior) is the baseline, why level five (principal) is reserved for people moving the industry forward, and how judgment separates people at the top
Profit share based on tenure rather than individual output, and why it doubles as retention
How a high-trust company handles a low performer - visibility, honest conversation, skill problem vs engagement problem, and why PIPs rarely earn their keep
The "manager of one" - hiring people who seek out problems without waiting to be told
The 2021 decision to draw a line on political conversation at work, the roughly twenty people who left, and what it revealed about when leadership steps in
Why staying private and bootstrapped for 25 years let the founders decide what the company is for, and why equity isn't the draw people assume
Self-determination theory - autonomy, competence, relatedness - and how 37signals delivers all three
Work as a product - treating work as something employees choose to buy, not something handed down
Six-week cycles, kickoffs and heartbeats - the light mechanisms that stop a decentralized company splintering into silos
Advice for anyone stuck inside a pay-for-performance cycle
People referenced
Andrea LaRowe - Director of People Operations, 37signals
Jason Fried - co-founder and CEO, 37signals
David Heinemeier Hansson - co-founder and CTO, 37signals
Dart Lindsley - 11Fold, host of Work for Humans; "work as a product"
Luke O'Mahoney - SapienX; "work as a product"
Megan Bernard-May - Pollinate XD; "work as a product"
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
Books
Rework - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
First, Break All the Rules - Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
What Pay Costs - James Alexander Seechurn
Organizations, podcasts and websites
37signals - bootstrapped company behind Basecamp and Hey
Radford - compensation survey used for benchmarking
Rework - 37signals' podcast
The 37signals employee handbook - on their website
Semco - Ricardo Semler's company, upward-feedback model
Haier, Handelsbanken and Buurtzorg - decentralized organizations referenced
The People Experience with Megan Bernard-May
15 mai 2026
01:27:52
Episode description
In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of the PX Dojo, and the person who led people experience at the BBC - to dig into what it means to treat the experience of work the way a UX designer treats a product.
Meg's core argument: people experience is another flavor of experience design. Traditional HR builds around policy, compliance, and risk management. A people experience approach starts somewhere else - finding the overlap between what's good for people, what's good for the business, and what's good for customers, then designing solutions inside that overlap rather than treating them as trade-offs.
What we covered:
Why traditional HR keeps shipping best-practice solutions that don't solve the problem, and what a design-led discovery process looks like instead
Meg's path from architecture to UX to people experience, including the master's in organizational psychology she did to round out the work
Why corporate environments resist experimentation in HR even though product teams A/B test routinely, and what makes an experiment "successful"
The BBC and what productivity meant there - why getting clear on that question first matters more than any solution
Pay complaints as symptoms - what's usually underneath them when benchmarking already says you're paying the market
A case study from a credit analyst team where dissatisfaction with pay turned out to be a job-design problem
Why dual career tracks still funnel people into management to chase money, and what flatter pay structures unlock
Self-determination theory as a stress test for any HR change - does it add autonomy, competence, and connectedness, or remove them?
Handelsbanken, Spotify guilds, and Haier as examples of decentralized models that lend themselves to a people experience approach
Where people experience should sit organizationally - outside HR, as a guild that runs across the business
Three things any HR practitioner can start doing tomorrow: ask better problem questions, stop asking for permission, document the work
People referenced
Megan Bernard-May - founder of Pollinate XD, co-creator of PX Dojo
Adam Axton - co-creator of PX Dojo, based in Melbourne
Dan Pink - "take pay off the table" framing
Luke O'Mahoney - "table stakes" framing of centralized HR
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
Books
Purpose and Work - Jessica Zwaan
What Pay Costs - James A Seechurn
Drive - Daniel Pink
Organizations and resources
Pollinate XD - Meg's consultancy, helping organizations move people experience out of HR and into the leadership function
PX Dojo - three-month cohort program for HR practitioners, structured white-belt to blue-belt
Humani - online HR community in Australia where Meg moderates an experience design circle and runs a book club
Handelsbanken - Swedish bank, decentralized operating units
Spotify - the guild model for cross-cutting disciplines
Haier - the marketplace model of the organization
Work as a Product with Dart Lindsley
07 mai 2026
01:29:40
In this episode of As Discussed..., I'm joined by Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of the Work for Humans podcast, and former head of business architecture for HR at Cisco Systems - to dig into the idea of work as a product.
Dart's core argument: companies have spent a century misclassifying their workforce. Employees fit the definition of customers, people who choose every day whether to keep buying the product called "your job." That reframe rearranges almost everything downstream - recruitment, onboarding, what managers do, how work gets allocated, and what good performance even means.
What we covered:
The category error at the root of modern management, and why scientific management's framing of people as factors of production still shapes practice today
How employees fit the definition of customers in a multi-sided business, and the route Dart took to that model through business architecture work at Cisco
The limits of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as a design framework, and what Dart found after asking thousands of people what job they hire their work to do
Negative transformation - the ways work changes us into people we don't want to be - and why that belongs on the cost side of the ledger
What it looks like when teams co-design their own work, including the four-dimensional bubble chart Dart uses to reallocate tasks based on what each person finds rewarding
Managers as brokers optimizing flow between two customers, the paying customer and the working customer
Common pushback on the model: does it scale, is it anti-capitalist, and why bother if the existing system seems to work
Plus a short detour into the night Dart climbed the Golden Gate Bridge
People referenced
Dart Lindsley - founder of 11Fold, host of Work for Humans
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - self-determination theory
Clayton Christensen and Bobby Moesta - Jobs to Be Done framework
Joe Pine - experience and transformation economies
Daniel Pink - autonomy, mastery, purpose
Alfie Kohn - critique of behaviorist management ("pop behaviorism")
Antonio Damasio - on emotion and reason in decision-making
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - the knowing-doing gap
Ricardo Semler - Semco's participative model
Bart Houlahan - co-founder of B Lab, partner at Irrational Capital
Sandra Loughlin - EPAM, on data architecture and AI
Semmelweis, Pasteur, Koch, Lister - the germ theory paradigm shift, used as analogy for how slowly new management ideas spread
Books
Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness - Richard Ryan and Edward Deci
The Transformation Economy - Joe Pine
Descartes' Error - Antonio Damasio
The Knowing-Doing Gap - Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
Drive - Daniel Pink
Punished by Rewards - Alfie Kohn
Podcasts and websites
Work for Humans - Dart's podcast, 190+ episodes
11fold.com - 11Fold's site, including a curated Discord community and an AI search across the Work for Humans back catalogue
PX Espresso - Luke O'Mahoney's podcast, where Dart appears as a guest
Irrational Capital - the ETF Dart references that tracks how employees feel about work at the companies they invest in
AeroPress - the world's best coffee maker
Connect with Dart on LinkedIn
Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn
29 avr. 2026
00:43:44
Alfie Kohn has spent decades dismantling the assumption that rewards work. His research across education, parenting, and the workplace remains some of the most rigorous and underread work on human motivation - required reading for anyone serious about how people actually behave. Punished by Rewards is the place to start, and it should sit on every compensation professional's shelf.
In this conversation, Alfie joins me to examine why behaviorism still dominates corporate management, what B.F. Skinner got wrong, and why financial incentives so reliably erode the intrinsic motivation they're meant to amplify. We dig into the role of promotion as a control mechanism, what the pay gap signals about corporate culture, and how the sales function exports extrinsic logic into the rest of the organization. We close on the cycle that keeps reward systems entrenched and the difficulty of moving colleagues past it.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Alfie Kohn's work and books
07:12 B.F. Skinner and behaviorism
15:34 The role of promotion in corporate America
22:07 The impact of the pay gap on corporate culture
33:27 The vicious cycle of rewards and motivation
The Equity Dilemma with Robyn Shutak
24 avr. 2026
01:29:39
Robyn Shutak is a Partner at Infinite Equity and one of the sharpest minds in equity compensation. She joins me to talk about what happens when equity stops working the way it was designed to - and whether it was ever designed well in the first place.
We get into underwater equity and the real cost of doing nothing about it. Vesting schedules built for a tenure reality that no longer exists. The gap between telling employees they are owners and what the cap table actually says. Why equity in VC-backed companies functions more like a lottery ticket than an ownership stake. And whether giving employees structured choice within their equity grants can close the gap between perceived value and actual value.
We also explore a harder question: if equity compensation depends on stock price cooperation to feel real, what does that tell us about the instrument itself?
Takeaways
Underwater equity is not a passive problem - inaction sends its own signal and concentrates retention risk among the people you can least afford to lose
Vesting was designed to protect the cap table, not retain employees - and there is little evidence it does
Most employees in VC-backed companies hold less than 20% of shares collectively - calling that ownership is a stretch
Structured choice within equity programs can increase perceived value without increasing spend
Equity works best when companies treat it as trust, not control
Chapters
00:00 Understanding Underwater Equity
42:23 Equity Compensation and Volatility
51:21 Employee Ownership in VC-Backed Companies
01:20:52 The Skeptical Side of Equity Ownership
A Post Mortem of "The Great HR Debate"
14 avr. 2026
01:01:40
ICYMI Kim Minnick, Kim Rohrer, and I lost a debate on pay for performance recently. We were debating against Mark Frein, Jessica Zwaan, and their team captain, Matt McFarlane. The whole thing was moderated by the amazing Jessie Schofer.
So we regrouped to chat about what we might have done better, discuss some of the reactions, and we meandered into other areas too.
We got into the history of how pay for performance became the default - how individualism got baked into compensation design, why corporate culture reinforces it, and what it would actually take to change it. We talked about legal personhood and how the way we define corporate success shapes everything downstream, including how we pay people. We got into bias, social media's role in calcifying bad management orthodoxy, and whether systemic change is even possible given the structures most of us are working inside.
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Pay Equity with Stefan Gaertner
08 avr. 2026
01:20:16
Stefan Gaertner has been thinking about pay equity longer than most people have known it was a problem. He's a long-time friend, colleague, and one of the sharpest minds in the field - so when I get him on the show, we have a lot to talk about.
In this episode, we get into the uneven global landscape of pay equity legislation and what that patchwork means for multinational employers trying to build coherent compensation programs. We talk pay transparency - what it's actually changing inside organizations versus what companies say it's changing. From there, we dig into the mechanics: point-factor job evaluation, salary band design, and why the methodology underneath your pay decisions matters more than most HR leaders want to admit.
We also spend real time on flat organizational structures and what happens to pay equity when you strip out the career ladder - and whether that's a feature or a bug. Then we close on AI: what it can genuinely do to support pay equity analysis, where human judgment is still non-negotiable, and why handing compensation decisions to an algorithm is a different kind of equity problem.
Chapters
00:00 The State of Pay Equity
08:06 Pay Transparency's Real Impact on Business
23:06 Point-Based Job Evaluation Systems
34:47 Salary Bands and Pay Fairness
43:03 Flat Structures, Career Decisions, and Pay Equity
1:10:33 AI's Role in Pay Equity
The Post HR Generation with Luke O'Mahoney
16 mars 2026
01:27:33
Luke O'Mahoney is the founder of SapienX, a platform of content, courses, and community for what he calls the "post-HR generation." His central argument is that People teams should operate like Product teams - designing, measuring, and iterating on the employee experience rather than administering it through siloed functions.
We dig into the limitations of the Ulrich model - the framework that split HR into Business Partners, Centers of Excellence, and Shared Services decades ago and has dominated ever since. Luke makes the case that those silos have produced systems that serve the function rather than the people, and that product thinking offers a way out.
We explore the Jobs to Be Done framework applied to HR, the difference between enabling performance and trying to drive it, and why reverse engineering problems matters more than jumping to solutions. I push back on some of the measurement assumptions embedded in product thinking and whether it risks falling into the same traps that broke performance management.
Whether you're a People leader feeling like the current model isn't working, or a compensation professional wondering why your systems aren't producing the outcomes you expected, there's a lot to chew on here.
The Evolution of Sales Force Effectiveness with Tom Hill
09 mars 2026
01:14:06
This episode with Tom Hill goes into the changing landscape of Salesforce effectiveness, highlighting the shift from a transactional role to a more consultative role. It explores the impact of AI and stakeholder management on sales, as well as the shift to team-based decision-making in the sales process. The conversation delves into the challenges of aligning sales with organizational goals, the complexities of quota setting, and the impact of long sales cycles on sales crediting. It explores the need for collaboration, understanding the organization, and the evolution of sales effectiveness in response to changing market dynamics.
Takeaways
Salesforce effectiveness is shifting from a transactional role to a more consultative role
The changing nature of sales and Salesforce effectiveness is driven by AI, stakeholder management, and the shift to a team-based decision-making process Sales Quota Setting
Sales Effectiveness
Sales Cycle Complexity
Chapters
00:00 The Shift to Team-Based Decision-Making in Sales
38:52 Aligning Sales with Organizational Goals
45:11 Challenges of Quota Setting
55:15 Long Sales Cycles and Crediting Challenges
Sales Compensation with James King
13 févr. 2026
01:11:34
The conversation delves into the complexities of sales compensation, debunking myths about seller motivation, and exploring the challenges of modern sales models. It emphasizes the importance of understanding customer segmentation, sales process, and product-market fit before designing sales incentives. The role of technology in trapping uncertainty and the significance of data-driven quota setting are also highlighted. The conversation covers the negotiation of sales targets, the role of leadership and authority in sales, dealing with big deals, sales plan design and philosophy, and financial modeling and governance. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the struggles of the sales team, treating salespeople as assets, and involving finance from the beginning of the process. The conversation covers the importance of governance in decision-making, the role of Compensation Cost of Sale (CCOS) in sales compensation, the impact of pay mix and plan complexity, and finally, the motivation behind the book 'What Pay Costs' focusing on pay for performance and innovation.
Takeaways
Understanding the complexities of sales compensation is crucial for effective incentive design.
The role of technology in modern sales and the challenges of quota setting require a balanced approach to navigate tensions and achieve sales targets. Understanding the struggles of the sales team is crucial for effective leadership
Salespeople should be treated as assets, not costs
Involving finance from the beginning of the sales plan design process is essential for successful financial modeling and governance Effective governance is essential for decision-making
CCOS plays a crucial role in sales compensation
Simplicity, alignment, and motivation are key in incentive plans
The book 'What Pay Costs' explores the impact of pay for performance and the importance of innovation
Chapters
00:00 Understanding Sales Compensation
19:39 Sales Compensation in Modern Sales
32:36 Navigating Tensions in Quota Setting
38:13 Negotiating Sales Targets
44:00 Sales Plan Design and Philosophy
51:16 Financial Modeling and Governance
01:01:11 The Importance of Governance
01:09:34 Pay Mix and Plan Complexity
01:20:34 The Book 'What Pay Costs'
Equity Compensation with Dan Walter
02 févr. 2026
01:20:30
In this conversation I pepper Dan Walter with questions about the evolution of equity compensation, highlighting the early days of equity distribution and the impact of IPOs on equity compensation. We also explore the challenges in valuing equity, the impact of high valuations on equity compensation, and the use of equity as a wealth creation tool. We discuss the use of equity as a differentiating component of rewards in the tech industry, the concept of employee stock purchase plans, and the evolution of equity compensation in the tech industry. We delve into the challenges and misconceptions surrounding equity as a retention mechanism and the need for improved communication and education around equity. Finally we explore the historical context of equity, its intended purpose, and the evolving landscape of equity compensation in modern organizations.